While writer’s make us think or might even provide a little comfort, their most important task, as Matthew Zapruder writes in Why Poetry, is to “create space where individual imagination can be activated…which helps preserve our minds as well as the possibility of mutual understanding, not by arguing for it, but by demonstrating it.”
It’s a shitty, frustrating time. The rise of Trump & Co coupled with global conflicts and a population that has been crippled by an excessively intense addiction to phones has bred a world of isolation and fear where there is a new terror to be ingested every day.
As crippling and out of control as it all appears, everything is as it was: air is air, water is water, the world on the same axis. And so…some words to mull:
Alien: exotic
Duende – the line between life and death (according to poet Federico Garcia Lorca)
Reverie: a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts
